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Dungeon Notes
Maria Plays Wizardry (series) This was a quasi-playthrough topic where board 8 users signed up as characters and I would insert them into my nuzlocke style Wizardry playthrough. Started out with the leader of the Guild a moral-less, cowardly thief named Maria whose main role was holding onto treasure. After a bunch of people died I accidentally forced myself into a game over by losing an important key item, so I wrote an ending where Maria wanders off into the dungeon alone and presumably went insane/died down there. This project was cool because it first gave me the idea of a dungeon-crawling project with user-created characters and also inspired me with the realization that even if I killed people again and again they wouldn't stop participating in the project as long as they could keep introducing new characters. After that EvilFairy sent her servant Bernkastel into the Guild HQ and took it over for the second playthrough. Bernkastel's MO was to gather foolish adventurers and send them into the dungeon to get killed. EvilFairy and her Evil Servant Bernkastel (Cat) would later be used to link the Wizardy series to the Dungeon series. Into the Dungeon 1 Probably the most pure fun of all the projects. None of the players really knew what was going on and hadn't quite figured out how to game the system or anything yet. Everyone was just doing random, goofy stuff and there was a ton of joke characters. Probably my favorite moment was when Osama Bin Laden revived the recently killed Barrack Obama as Barry Soetoro and they teamed up to try and take on the dungeon together. Just side splitting laughter for me. Raistandt was introduced here as well as the concept of Demons as enemies that would come back, stronger, every time they were killed. The main boss was actually a group of Fiends known as the Mind Flayers which were killed by Ushiromiya Ange. Somehow Ed Bellis started a long tradition of Umineko and Dungeon series being tightly intertwined. This was after Kinzo died while riding a jet ski into an army of trogyldytes. Literally the most pure fun. Into the Dungeon 2: Soltar's Tomb This is the one I remember the least about. I was very hyped after the success of Into the Dungeon 1 and I didn't want to wait long before doing something similar. As a result this one probably came along without quite as much of a break as it needed. There were probably as many joke characters but the game itself wasn't quite as fresh anymore. The Brown-Eyed Maiden makes her first appearance and this is the first game to not feature any Demons. Brown-Eyed Maiden served as the protoype for the "ambiguously aligned adventurer girl" who would harass or help the players in all future games. In this case, The Brown-Eyed Maiden was completely obsessed with treasure and didn't give a lick about the adventurers. They did end up fighting but when the players ran away she just threw a fit and kicked the mountain down with her magic shoes. In this game the final boss was kajetokun of youtube fame, but was later revealed to be superangelo128 in disguise. Only lefty stayed behind to fight him, and lost. This was the first Game Over scenario for the players. In this case, Space Cop Ryoko and a Berserker named Accel escaped with their lives, along with Plum IV. This game established the concept of bloodlines and generational characters. Kahu the Beastmaster (from game 1)'s descendants made brief cameos. Additionally, Plum IV's lineage would produce adventurers in later games. Officially titled Soltar's Tomb, this was the first game to have a subtitle. Into the Dungeon 3: Out of the Dungeon This is where I first realized that I could heavily dial back the game mechanics and use the dungeon-driven format in order to tell an actual story with user-submitted characters. It wasn't too different from some CYOA's I ran on the board in the past but it was insanely ambitious. This game was so long it came in two parts (Crystal Skycity and Truman's Last Stand). I wanted to do something different here and I think I accomplished what I set out to do. In the first part, players didn't start outside and go into a dungeon for some quest. As the title implied, the characters started INSIDE of a sprawling dungeon and had to find their way to the surface without getting killed. The unfortunate side effect is that players who died couldn't be replaced, but the more narrative structure of the game still kept people interested even after their characters died. In the second part the players had been rescued by a Knight named Truman who revealed that the Demons were still attacking the surface world while the players had been underground. The survivors are rounded up and brought to war with Truman as a last ditch effort to save the Crystal King of Ganthia. For me this was pretty much the peak of the Dungeon series. There were virtually no updates that I felt like I was phoning them in. Maybe a few early on when I was still getting a feel for things. But really the epic storytelling made this so much more awesome than previous projects. The Brown-Eyed Maiden made her second appearance her, revealing herself as Annie (nicknamed "Ugly Annie") and actually helping the players. For a while, at least. She decides to duck and run when a boss style enemy appears, deciding that she's gathered enough treasure by that point. This was the first game to feature lengthy, serious epilogues as a reward for each character to survive. It was another element I really like and tried to incorporate into each subsequent game. Raistandt returns and the Demon race is more fleshed out, as well as the Cosmic beings who are represented by the Living Darkness, EvilFairy. Princess Snow White/Black might be the first case where I ever tricked players into following an NPC who turned out to be evil all along. Ever since then, players became much more wary of any text I presented to them. Sometimes it was hilarious in later games to watch you guys work yourselves up into a panic over some choice I offered, when it really just meant exactly what it said. On that note, this was also the first game where player discussion became a HUGE thing. In previous games, each player would generally just do whatever they wanted each turn. You had a 1/3 chance of success, after all. But in this game there were CHOICES to be made and they players had to discuss what were the best options. As a result, the tradition of having lengthy discussions would be carried on even in later games that were game mechanic based. Into the Dungeon 4 This game takes place after a timeskip. The Epilogues of Out of the Dungeon basically revealed a large part of the story that I didn't feel like running as a game. Essentially the Humans and Demons team up to drive away the Cosmic forces, but the Demons betray the Humans after the war and conquer most of the known world. Much, much later this game takes place during a time where Humans first start fighting back against the Demon occupation. The second time that the players ended up with a Game Over scenario, as everyone died against the final boss. Whoops. The ambiguous adventurer girl in this game was Kanon, an archeologist who idolized "Ugly Annie," despite the fact that Annie wasn't very well known (she hated things like reputation and thus didn't leave much of a mark on history). While Annie was more neutral, Kanon was definitely leaning on the evil side. She allied herself with Demons in exchange for the ability to experiment on Humans. Her goal was to recreate the Magic Shoes that Annie wore. When the players attack the dungeon, Kanon finds out that the Demons were hoarding items that could be used to kill her. When she realized the Demons were planning on betraying her, she turns on them. All of the players are killed and the cavalry arrives just in time to find Kanon has killed the last Demon. She's basically praised as a HERO. This is when Humans become independent in the West, but they're still under Demon Occupation in the rest of the world. There's not much more to say about this game sadly, it was similar to ITD2 in that I probably jumped the gun and ran it too soon. Interest wasn't super high from players, and I phoned in a good number of updates because I wasn't as into it as I thought I'd be. Player inactivity toward the end really frustrated me, leading to a long break before the next game. Into the Dungeon 5: Out of the Dungeon 2 What a title on that one. It also had two parts, like the original Out of the Dungeon. So add two subtitles to that. Demon's Fall and Angel's Descent. Okay, okay. Maybe a bit much but this game itself was actually very fun. This was a case where I tried a few new things and maybe I should have stuck to the format I used for the original Out of the Dungeon. I had a lot of fun running it but there were certain things the players didn't seem to enjoy. The presence of the Devil's Luck ability really soured the first portion of the game. Players were too afraid to take any action other than voting as one solid unit and that killed discussion as well as strategy. Hilariously when the group with Devil's Luck in it actually voted the worst option, all as one, assuming that if they had DL they would all survive, the player with DL actually didn't vote. . . leading to everyone getting killed. I was fine with this thought because I'm glad it got DL out of the game early on and I could move on to other things. This one took the idea of Truman's Last Stand and expanded on it. In this story, the players actually started in their own home base and were part of an ongoing, more large scale war that took place across the entire Southern half of the known world. For such a wide open idea, the game was actually pretty hyper focused on certain areas/scenarios though. There were many, many chapters in this game that I thought were very well written and consider some of my best work. That being said, I can't consider this the peak. I really went all out with the postgame epilogues and other things for this game, and that was really satisfying. This story probably fleshed out the Dungeon world more than any other game by building upon all previous story elements and explaining how they related to each other. Into the Dungeon 6: The Tomb of Fiends I noticed that player sign-ups had been steadily declining by this point, so I tried changing the title of the topic and not including Into the Dungeon in it at all. My concern was that people were thinking it was some really long-running story and they were afraid of having to get caught up on a ton of stuff to be able to join the game. Unfortunately, changing the title didn't help and the number of players declined to an all time low. Even with that, having a very solid playerbase that was super invested in the game was nice in its own way. I tried to re-create the style of Into the Dungeon 4 by mixing the storytelling and gameplay elements together. This time I had learned from my previous mistakes and produced something really wonderful. I'd say this game and the previous were the ones that came closest to Into the Dungeon 3 in terms of raw quality. Like with ITD 5, I feel like some of my best actual writing can be found in the updates of this game. However, in this case, players seemed to be on board for the most part. Another Game Over Scenario for the players in this one (jeez, I'm starting to notice they developed a really poor record after the first game). I was okay with the ending we got, but it's actually not the one I would have preferred. Yeah, that's right, I'm not all about BAD ENDINGS in every case. This time I actually would have liked if the Dark Throne was destroyed. Mysrie and Clinton would escape the dungeon alive and go onto make millions of Ancient Royal babies and live happily ever after. In fact, this game was actually framed narratively different than previous games. In this one, I consider Mysriandierella to have been the main character, even though she didn't appear until the second half. It was more like a game where the players get to take the role of the supporting cast, and wander into the main story so they could influence it.